Tell it Slant
by TheRedPenofDoom87
Summary: One shot. "Rosalee exhales a huge breath and hates how quiet this place is. How alone she is and how hard it is keeping it all together. So she presses 'send' and as soon as the message bubble pops up on her screen, she hates herself for it." Spoilers for 4.09 and 4.10


I know I said I had no plans for more ff and then 4.09 and 4.10 happened and I dove right back in.

IF YOU DON'T WANT TO BE SPOILED STAY AWAY

Anyway, I figured Rosalee didn't sleep at all when Monroe was gone and probably wasn't the first time and then...this...erupted out of my pen...so enjoy

Disclaimer: I own nothing at all, except the fact that I like to watch these two nerds fall in love again and again and again because I'm trash.

* * *

"_Tell all the truth but tell it slant—" Emily Dickinson (__1__263)_

* * *

I

It's three am and Rosalee can't sleep. Again.

She's tried everything: tea, warm milk, reading, meditation, a hot bath. She flipped on her back, stomach, tried both sides. Nothing is comfortable in this bed. She's already tried the couch but it's too hard, too red...too full of memories to be relaxing.

Her muscles ache with the weeklong effort of trying to carve a place for herself in this dank apartment; moving furniture around and pulling the blinds back to catch what little sunshine Portland had to offer. She threw out the dead plants and gave boxes of his clothes to Goodwill. She cleaned everything, got down on her hands and knees and scrubbed until her knuckles were raw. She hoped against hope that all this emotional and physical purging would send her directly to dreamland.

And yet, three AM rolls around and she's staring, exasperated, at the ceiling once again.

It's not surprising, she reasons to herself, given the last few weeks; her abrupt move from Seattle funeral arrangements made. But today, exactly a week after she buried Freddy, she stood in court and watched the men who killed her brother be sentenced to jail. She expected to feel relief that these men would answer for the crime and quell this awful storm of wanting that raged inside of her.

Cool and confident Nick, who'd watched a thousand cases go to trial, held victim's hands, told her there was no way they could walk. Monroe, on the other her other side, said little and offering no false hopes or white lies. And they watched them take their punishment with bent heads and quiet clasped hands. They would go on living —albeit behind bars, but alive, nonetheless— while she would have to sit with her loss for the rest of her life. No justice system could rip a hole wide enough in them to make them feel what she felt.

They didn't even have the balls to look her in the eye as they were shuffled away— out of sight and out of mind. And she was not sated in the least bit as they disappeared. All the congratulations that fell on her ears were hollow and utterly devoid of meaning.

Flipping on the light beside her bedside, she fiddles with her phone. She flicks through emails making note of new orders to fill, questions to follow up tomorrow. But work won't make this go away. She flicks through her contacts, thinking through the friends she left behind in Seattle. She pauses here and there, weighing her options about whether or not she should bother. And she keeps passing them by. She gets to the M's and stops at Monroe.

As court was dismissed for the next case, he'd leaned down and told her to call if she needed anything. He didn't tell her he was sorry or that everything would be all right. He just sounded sincere.

She nodded numbly and stared down at his hand that lay between. She could have reached out and taken it, given him something in exchange but she didn't.

She types up a text: _You awake?_ And her thumb hovers over the send button. It's so stupid, he's probably dead to the world asleep, she thinks savagely.

Rosalee exhales a huge breath and hates how quiet this place is. How alone she is and how hard it is keeping it all together. So she presses 'send' and as soon as the message bubble pops up on her screen, she hates herself for it.

She flips off the light and buries her face in her pillow. Stupid...stupid, stupid. God, he probably thinks...nope. Not gonna go there.

Her phone pings suddenly. Swallowing hard and loathing that there isn't a take a text back function yet, she drags her thumb across the lock.

_You okay?-M_

_Can't sleep. Sorry- R._ She winces at herself and how needy she sounds.

And it pings again: _Did you know that there are more species of insect on earth than any other kinds of animal.-M_.

_No, I didn't. Thanks for the nightmares-R_

_Did you know that the flu virus can stay alive on a piece of paper for __1__7 days?-M_

_Are you trying to fact me to sleep?-R_

_Is it working?-M_

Rose yawns and settles back against the pillow, clutching her phone between her hands. _Yeah, it is sort of._

_Did you know that no two zebras have the same stripe pattern?-M_

She wondered if he was googling "random facts to convince an unhinged woman to go to sleep and stop texting me at three in the goddamn morning" or if he just knows all of this. Either way, it's nice to know there's someone who's awake with her. It made her room a little less dark, the walls a little less oppressive, the storm in her a little calmer. Her eyelids start to droop and she almost misses the next one.

_Did you know that I don't mind?-M._

* * *

II

It's three AM and Rosalee hasn't gone to sleep yet. She wandered through the labyrinthine halls of First Hill, one of the larger non-research hospitals in Seattle, for a good thirty minutes, enveloped in a fog of sleeplessness and terror and a gripping hyperawareness that she is being pulled into opposite directions.

A sympathetic nurse points to the intensive care ward but gives her too many ebullient 'lefts', 'rights' and 'follow the hall' to register in Rosalee's fuddled brain. And so, she has to ask a second nurse, who looks as though she'd reached the very end of her necessary helpfulness, around the second 'left' and fourth 'right' to point her in the right (correct) direction.

Rosalee stumbles upon the intensive care ward and flops onto the nurse's station there. The poor girl, who looked just shy of twenty, sat back and assured her aunt was sleeping now and had been for the last few hours. The tiny slip of a thing led Rosalee down yet another antiseptically clean hall, speaking in medical jargon that Rosalee could just barely understand.

She finds her aunt quietly snoring in her hospital bed. The heart monitor hums along, reporting everything's beating normally. And Rosalee supposes she can draw some amount of comfort from that. Some, but there's not much to be found. She's scraping the very bottom of her comfort barrel at the moment.

And it's strange to see Sylvia lying in bed like this. When she arrived in Seattle years ago, scrawny with malnutrition and shaking with withdrawals, Sylvia had been waiting. Gathering Rosalee up into a well-practiced hug, Sylvia grabbed her meager bag of belongings and told her that she'd put meat on Rosalee's bones in no time at all. She said nothing about where Rosalee had been for the last few years, and how awful it must have been and had she talked to her mother? No, Sylvia's rough practicality and no-nonsense drew Rosalee into a warm living room and a new life. And for that Rosalee is sitting here, when she feels yanked 173 miles south. Not that she's been counting or anything.

She plugs in her phone and waits for it to boot up again. Her phone lasted just long enough to get the call from Nick. But after that it up and died. She had to borrow her seatmate's phone to call for a cab, not wanting to try to walk the mile and a half to the hospital.

"He came out of it okay." Nick assured her. "There were some...complications."

"What kind?" Her breath caught in her windpipe and she swore her lungs were going to burst. "What happened? Did you take him to the hospital?"

"No...nothing like that. It's...her. She...jumped in front of the gun...she didn't make it."

Rosalee ran her hand over her forehead. "How is he?"

She can hear Nick wince over the hundred or so miles. "Upset would be putting it mildly—"

She wanted to yell for the driver to turn around. That she's needed in Portland. And then her phone died. She pressed the heel of her hand to mouth to suppress the shriek of frustration that fought to be contained. She clutched it hard between her hands to keep herself from flinging it at the wide tinted windows. Shit. Goddamn.

This was not part of the plan. None of this had been. She was supposed to return to Seattle after she buried her brother; she was not supposed to find comfort in his shop, in their shared childhood smells and sounds. She was not supposed to find friends or fall ill and wildly kiss a man with broad shoulders and gently rough hands she was afraid to touch— for fear of being unable to stop. He was not supposed to allow her to, he was not supposed to be kind and thoughtful and generous to open his life to her. To offer her things that she was not supposed to want, being the toughened woman she had become.

Rosalee stared out the window the rest of the way, thinking darkly that perhaps it was a reminder of what was not supposed to be.

When it's finally got enough juice, Rosalee opens up her message box to find a single text.

_You awake?-M_

_Did you know that organ transplant recipients have reported having cravings and behaviors matching their donors?_ She shoots back as quick as her fingers allow. _Did you know that it takes the average person 7 minutes to fall asleep? Did you know that 85% of all plant life is in the ocean?_

_Are you trying to fact me to sleep?-M_

_Is it working?-R_

_Maybe a little bit-M._

_Did you know that honey is the only natural food that never goes bad?-R. _She smiles , if only to keep the tears at bay: _Did you know that I wish I was there with you?-R_

She's one hundred and seventy five point six miles away and she can imagine him sitting on the couch, unable to let himself sleep, to let himself simply be. And she hopes he knows that she's there with him. She balls her coat up and leans against the wall, trying to catch some sleep. Just as she's about to drop off, her phone pings.

_Did you know you've been gone eight hours and I miss you already?-M_

* * *

III

It's three am and Rosalee can't turn off her brain. Her mouth hurts from smiling so widely and then trying to hide it around everyone else. Or at least tone it down for them. Then again, Nick looked almost as relieved at the turn of events.

After months of careful not touching, pretending not to notice glances that lingered a few seconds too long, after days and weeks of phone calls and texts, she flung caution to the wind and indulged in a kiss freely given—right there in the exhaust fumes that hung in the low lying clouds and the eternally rain-slicked streets of the city she'd reclaimed. Rosalee would have happily stood there kissing him until the world ended, but it decided to keep turning instead. She pulled back, pleased to find him amusingly dazed, and realized that storm, which howled in her months earlier, had returned with a selfish vengeance of a different nature. _I want_, it chanted deep down in the cavern of her chest. _I want, I want, I want. _

Grabbing her phone off the table, she texts him: _Did you know that I can't stop thinking about today?_ She doesn't try to play it off as a winsome indulgence anymore; she wants to talk to him and she's not going to be ashamed.

_Did you know you're not the only one?-M_

_Did you know I'd been thinking of that for a really long time?-R_

And then her phone is quiet for five minutes. Frowning, Rosalee sets it back down. Maybe it was too much too soon. Maybe she should keep that to herself.

And then it rings. She slides it open and doesn't even bother with 'hello.' "Did you know that I'd hoped you call?"

He chuckles and the sound wraps itself around her, warm and familiar. "Did you know that I still don't understand why you're never asleep at three in the morning?"

"Maybe it's because I know you'll answer my texts?"

"Did you think that maybe I answer because I _want_ to talk to you?"

"Maybe..." She pulls the covers up to her chest and slides down the pillows, imagining that he's doing the same.

"So, exactly how long have you been thinking about it then?"

"Since the first time." Which she believed to be nothing more than a dream reminding her that clearly it'd been a very long time since she'd been with anyone. When she opened her eyes again after the feverish dream and found him waiting for her. She asked because he looked as dazed as she felt. Her cheeks reddened as the grin that spread across his face told her that those hard, harsh kisses, borne of years of isolation, and her desperate curling fingers in his jacket collar hadn't all been in her head. Oh God... "To be honest, I wish we'd gotten that moment in the park."

Everything had been so still, so peaceful. It would have sweet, she thinks. All the nervous glances and careful hand placements would have simply melted away in the quiet. And she would have pulled back, carefully considering the thrill that sang through her, smiled and kissed him again.

"I'm not complaining about the one...well, ten, in the shop," he confesses.

She drags her covers over head. "They don't count!" She laughs. "I wasn't in my right mind." _I want to remember them._

"And you were in your right mind today?"

"Very much."

He pauses and all the unspoken things lay on the line. "Are...are you going to be in your right mind tomorrow?"

_No_, she wants to say with a flirtatious growl. _I want to be in my wrong mind and go leaping in without thought because I don't know to do with all this wanting._ "Yes," she says quietly.

"Did you know that I want to see you tomorrow?"

* * *

IV

Rosalee is not in her bed. She's not at the shop or in the back of Nick's truck (which has happened on more than one occasion lately). And she's not alone either (again, not an uncommon occurrence). And she's not wearing much (she'd be more surprised if their clothes had stayed on longer than they had).

His right arm is looped around her waist and curled under her lower back, his chin settled on her shoulder. Her left hand lies splayed on his collarbone, pulling him in until they dozed off. For a while now, that storm that howled inside her has subsided. The deep echo of want is there and it flames into an inferno when he's around. But for the moment, its a soft grumbling—easily placated with the memory of his mouth brushing across her navel and the quiet rustle of sheets between them.

The first time, they danced around each other, never letting the kiss get too far that it couldn't be paused and then picked back up again. When he pulled away to breathe, she shook her head. "Did you know?" She murmured and closed the distance between them. "That I want you to keep kissing me?"

"Yeah?" He replied.

"Yeah." She slipped her arms around his neck and pressed herself against him. Their one kiss swiftly became two and then three and then hands following button trails and breathless 'yes's against the doorframe. And she'd been right, though. Once she let herself, she couldn't stop ghosting her fingers over him.

Even as they were falling asleep and only half the words they said made sense, she ran her fingers through his hair and down his collarbone. She tucked her face in closer and let her fingers trail down his back and paused at the puckered skin in the shape of a crescent moon on his shoulder blade.

She frowned, testing it again.

"S'long story..." he murmured.

"How long?" She whispered.

"Broken beer bottle, some not so Weidler blutbad, and a lot of stupid ideas about what being a pack really meant— that kind of long." He looked over at her, expecting disgust or fear.

Instead, she settled her hand on his face, running her thumb over his cheekbone. "Did you know?" she whispered. "I like a man with scars. Good or bad."

He pulled her into him until they lay forehead to forehead. They could not kiss away the scars, they could not love away memories, but they could make space for each other. And they could let it take them where it would.

Afterward, she slipped from beneath his anchoring arm to grab his shirt and her underwear and tiptoed to the bathroom. She washed her hands and looked up at herself, her hair loose and wild, skin flush and her lips just slightly swollen. And the thought bubbles up: _this can't last_. _Happy doesn't last forever and you know it._ _How long until he gets tired of you? How long until this isn't enough? _

Rosalee swallowed hard, running on hand over her cheek, she winced at the memories of days better left behind her.

"Rosalee?" His voice was warm and worried. Incapable of cruelty.

She splashed her face with cold water, washing the thoughts down the drain where they belonged.

"I thought you were skipping out on me." He murmured when she emerged.

She shook her head,.

"Did you know?" He said quietly as she walked back to the bed and sat beside him, loose limbed and strangely awake. "That I don't want you to go?"

"Did you know that I don't want to?" She laughed and leaned forward to meet him in a kiss. She felt him smile against her as she swung one leg over him, staking some invisible claim. Not that she really needed to. He looped his arms around her and pulled her in so all his edges met hers and nothing was lost. He only let go to peel the shirt over her head and toss it away. And she didn't shrink or shy away, only held him tighter and forgot that daylight was only a handful of hours away..

And tonight, she has his "I love you..." declaration ringing in her ears and his hand on her bare back, encircling her. He was so nervous about it, as if he worried that she didn't feel the same way. And he just told her without any of their qualifiers. He just said it because he didn't have any other words to hide behind.

Rosalee thought her heart was going to explode into a pulpy mess between them and wondered later, if she ever really heard her heart beat before, really felt all of her skin at once like that. Because she was sure she hadn't. Reaching out, she took his slightly trembling fingers in hers and squeezed. Even though she wasn't sure the words didn't seem to cover what she felt for him, she told him she loved him too.

Careful not to dislodge him, she checks the time on her phone and smiles. It's three AM. Of course, it is.

* * *

V

Twenty-eight hours and no sleep is starting to wear on her. Add to that the number of times she's cried today and its probably taken years off her life. Then again, if she has spend those years alone, she's at peace with letting them go.

Another wave of terror is threatening to overtake her —terror and worry and utter heart-brokenness at how he so easily slipped through her fingers. She twists the rings on her fingers, a new habit, thinking that this was supposed to be forever and now it's being stolen from her. And anger, now, too, threatens to choke her. Seven months married and her husband was stolen from in the dead of night, like the twist in some fairy tale.

It's ironic that the titles, husband and wife, have only started to seem real and normal to her. Some days, she looks up from her work to see him walk through the door and think; _that's my husband_. Sometimes, he sneaks up behind her when she's fixing her hair in the morning and kisses the top of her head and says _my wife._ And it still makes her giggle. They were this close to having a normal newlywed life. This close and now her husband's disappeared without a trace by a group that's notorious for leaving bloody, fire-twisted bodies in their wake and families too traumatized to say a word.

She wants to cry and wail but nothing comes up. She can't scrape the hollows of herself any further to bring out the tears; she's cried them all dry by now. Rosalee sits ramrod straight beside the couch while Juliette sleeps above her. It's the only comfort she can draw from the house that is not her own, listening to her friend breath evenly and deeply. She can't wrap her arms around him from behind when he's cooking dinner and feel like she can breathe for the first time in the day. Or read to her when she can't sleep (and usually she's out within ten minutes).

She knew they'd hurt her; they called and told her so. The dead fox left dripping on her back door seemed like child's play now. They told her she'd pay for what she'd done, for daring to fall in with someone who was nothing like her. They'd scoffed at it, saying none of that mattered anymore, more to assure themselves that they'd be okay, no matter what. But how it seemed to matter now that there is a gaping hole in her his name on it. And that voice in the deepest part of her, under all the storms and the infernos, cries: _I want, I want, I want. I need. _

Her heart gives a painful squeeze at the thought of never seeing his sleeping face again, to never have him draw her into his arms after the alarms go off but before they can find the wherewithal to rise and face the day. The idea that she'd never watch him bent over his worktable again or feel his hand on her cheek before they both really wake fills her with vertigo.

_We know how these marriages tear families apart,_ his mother told them not long after their engagement. And its part of why she hasn't called and told her mother and father-in-law. They've made their peace with her and love her in the way they can but it's still tenuous— that is to say, not as a child of their own; there's still worry, still a small amount of wide-eyed how-far-can-this-really-go. And she's too stubborn and proud (and in love) to let them say _I told you so_.

The clock on the wall opposite her slowly ticks to three thirty. While she doesn't want to sleep, for fear in missing Nick's phone call, her eyes are gritty and her eyelids weigh so much she's not sure how long she can keep them open.

Instead she pulls out her phone because she doesn't know what else to do, her face aglow in the electric light, and texts him: _Did you know that I love you?_

_Do you know that I miss you?_

_Did you know that I need you to come home?_

_Please come home._

_Please._

She buries her face in her knees again, hearing the notifications go off not fifteen feet from her, knowing that he can't read what she's writing him. But surely, surely, he knows that she's with him.

* * *

VI

Rosalee wakes to the sound of her name called over and over again. She snaps into action—the hallmark of the last few stressful days—and flips on her bedside lamp, her fingers already stretching for her phone.

But she pauses when she looks over to see her husband lying there beside her, although not as peacefully as she would have liked. Not that she can blame him. When they finally found him, bloody and bruised in the middle of the woods, she threw her arms around his neck and waited for him to reciprocate. When he didn't, she noticed the chains on his wrists and that anger that kept her alive and awake for the days leading up to this, awoke in her again. That voice that howled at Freddy's death, roared at this. Roared so loud, she couldn't hear Monroe say her name.

Rosalee has to stop and remember that he's safe with her now and no one is ever going to touch him again; she ripped a coward's throat out to prove it to anyone who beheld her in her blood soaked blouse.

Beside her, Monroe mutters her name over and over again, fingers clenched in his pillow. "Love..." she runs her fingers down his arm and squeezes gently. "Monroe, it's all right...wake up, you're dreaming."

He snaps awake as well, he stills and looks over at her.

"Just a dream..." she promises and kisses his ear, lingering there. "Just a dream, I'm here."

He closes his eyes for a moment against the nightmare. Slowly, he turns over to her and Rose winces at the swelling that somehow seems worse in the low light and the privacy of their home. She sits up and grabs the arnica off the bedside table, noting how light it suddenly is. "You want to tell me about it?" She wonders as she dabs a little under his right eye and then moves on to the lump on his cheekbone. Thankfully (and unlike Nick) he doesn't fight her on her ministrations, which are second nature now.

His arm comes around her waist. "They had you," he whispers.

She huffs out a small sigh. "Somehow, I feel like this is not the last time you're going to have this dream."

"Probably not," he agrees, running his hand up her back.

"If you want to stay up a while, I'll get you more ice, see if I can't make that swelling go down."

"No," he insists and clutches her a little closer. "No, I'm fine. Besides, did you say once that you like a man with scars?"

Rosalee grins and lays a gentle hand on his left cheek. "I did, but lumps are another thing entirely. I understand if you don't want to sleep yet, I can-"

He holds her still, one hand covering her wrist, the other on the small of her back. "Please, don't go," he murmurs out of a split lip. "Please...just stay."

She leans down to kiss him as gently as she can. "Of course, I'll stay." She wraps her arms around him and pulls him in, both of his settle around her waist. "Did you know that the average person spends six years of their life dreaming? Or that we have around three to seven dreams a night?"

"No, I didn't."

"Giraffe's only sleep for two hours a day."

"Are you trying to fact me to sleep?"

Rosalee kisses her husband's forehead, pressing her cheek against the top of his head for a moment. "Is it working?"

"Little bit..."

"Did you know that I love you?" she whispers, fingers tightening on his nightshirt and settling in his hair. "Did you know that all I wanted was for you to come home to me? Did you know that I'm never letting you out of my sight ever again?"

His breath brushes against her neck as he exhales, contentedly. "I'm never going anywhere."

Rosalee smiles and waits until he's dropped off again, to reach over and turn off the light. It's three am and it's enough to send her to sleep.

* * *

Yeah, okay, I think I'm done now.


End file.
